Day 4
There are some things on my travels in the past that I’ve chosen to share, through stories and photographs, with friends, family, and Loose Luggage readers. Most things, actually. But on several of the trips I’ve been on there have been certain sacred moments that were so personal, so meaningful, so soaked with emotion and loaded with personal implications for the trajectory of my life, that I’ve kept them to myself—either in part or in whole.
These moments range from a hilltop in Northern Thailand, to an empty beach in Southern France, to a tiny mud hut, in dim late-night lamplight, in Southern Uganda. The tying factor in all of these stories is usually (though not always) a bold, starry sky, under which I’m safely and contentedly (though unexpectedly) sprawled out for sleep.
Day four of my life-changing trip to Port au Prince just after the recent earthquake was, in itself, my most uneventful day. But it ended just such—under the stars in an unexpected place—that it will remain the most potent memory of the trip. It was a hot, frustrating, disillusioning day, a wild-goose-chase of sorts, and I spent most of the day irritated at feeling ineffective. It was the mid-point of my entire trip, and the last day our rag-tag rescue team spent together before going our separate ways and setting out on our own adventures.
My fourth day— third full day in Port au Prince—was, more than anything else, a logistical nightmare, a telling testament to the chaotic remains of a city whose infrastructure before the earthquake was already as fragile as glass. At an early hour, Ben, Doug, and I pulled ourselves out of bed, alerted our driver, loaded up our truck, gathered our team of Haitian friends who were volunteering their time with us, and bumped and bobbed our way down the rocky dirt road through town.
There were two major obstacles that made our day tiresome and made us feel incredibly ineffective. One, was that we were almost completely out of cash. The currency in Port au Prince had become, almost exclusively, the American dollar. Any Haitian money that was in circulation was minimal and limited to what people had in their pockets before the quake. All the banks were defunct and, though rumors kept circulating that they would re-open the next morning—it would never happen while I was there.
The second problem was directly linked to the first—we were nearly out of gas, and gas was becoming increasingly hard to come by. A fascinating result of the presence of media and aid/rescue workers in the city were two booming industries: private drivers and translators. Every day the average cost of a ride—both short and long—rose steeply. They all seemed to be communicating well with each other across the city, because every morning there seemed to be a new consensus on what the going day-rate was for a driver or translator.
It isn’t that we weren’t happy to use their services and pay them well, but cash was becoming a precious commodity since there was no way of getting one’s supply replenished without leaving the country or having a colleague bring in a fresh supply. And the gas stations were running out of gas.
Doug, a member of the Peruvian Fire Department, who had been allegedly contracted (unofficially) by the Turks, Chinese, and Peruvians to head up a rescue effort, was insistent on meeting up with their respective leaders. So amidst efforts to get even a gallon of gas from somewhere, we were also bouncing around from compound to compound, in and out of UN headquarters and Sunapi, attempting to locate the Turks, Chinese, and Peruvians.
One by one, we managed to get in contact with all of Doug’s people. It turns out that the Chinese had landed in Port au Prince, and within eight hours of arriving, had climbed back on a plane to head home. The Turks—though we discovered a lively team of Turkish Red Cross workers, didn’t seem to have any organized rescue effort, at least that we could locate. Upon meeting the Turkish authorities at the UN, Doug was greeted warmly but told there was no rescue team being assembled.
Doug, who was growing increasingly irritated at the overall situation, was at the very least satisfied that there was nothing more to be done at the UN, and we spent the better part of the afternoon driving around the city, attempting to find a gas station that still had gas. Throughout the course of the day I remained in the bed of the truck with my three Haitian brothers. The vehicle leapt and bounced violently over pot-holes and ill-paved roads. We covered our faces with make-shift masks to vent the dust and smell of rotting bodies, and surveyed the damaged city—whose destruction was new at every turn, becoming more apparent and more visceral around every corner.
Throughout the past couple of days I had been in contact via text-messaging with several people. A couple of them were photographers that I had never met but had been connected to just prior to my trip. We had been keeping each other in the loop with any and all information we had gathered individually—what hospitals had vacancies, which hotels or consulates to sleep and eat at, etc. One of those photographers, the only one that I met up with while in Haiti, was Simon, a commercial photographer from New York. He had been texting me his whereabouts throughout the day, and informed us that he was currently working at Villa Creole, an upscale hotel in Petion Ville that had become a central hub for rescue workers and international press.
Desperate to find a way to get gas and cash—without these we were no help to anyone—we decided that we would use what remained in our gas tank to drive to Villa Creole and utilized the resources there so we could continue to be of use in the city.
The drive up the hill to Petion Ville turned out to be a long and winding two-lane road that was completely grid-locked with vehicles—both from locals and from the international community that was filling the city. UN vehicles, ambulances, press vans, and local buses had turned the roads into clogged arteries that made traveling anywhere—even a few miles—a half-day trip. My eyes were stinging as I sat in the back of the truck, dust and filth filling the air around me. The day was beginning to feel like a complete daze, and I was growing more and more anxious to actually do something.
The major problem in those first days after the quake, both on a micro and macro scale, was that it took ten times longer to get anything done. There were so many resources coming to Haiti—hundreds of millions of dollars, supplies, aid workers and doctors—but because of the limited infrastructure and level of devastation from the quake, they were all bottle-necked coming in.
Every day we were hearing the sad stories—and I assure you they were not rumors—of piles and piles of food, water, and medical supplies that were simply sitting on the tarmac at the airport. We were hearing story after story of doctors and rescue workers whose planes circled the Port au Prince airport before returning to Miami or Santo Domingo, unable to land.
In general it was difficult to imagine what could possibly be stopping these resources from making it into the hands of Haiti’s desperate people. But that day, Day Four, though I can’t very easily articulate it, I understood. There were so many countries, so many organizations, so many individuals with their own agenda, their own interests, their own way of doing things. And people were in a panicked state. The Haitians were getting desperate and fearful, and the rescue and relief efforts were understandably rushed and hasty. In those first few days after the quake, there was such madness on all fronts, and it was a self-perpetuating, constant handicap to accomplishing even the smallest task.
About halfway up the hill to Villa Creole, we finally found a gas station that appeared to have gas. It was completely crowded, with people and vehicles stuffed into every crevice of bare space, with no order whatsoever, as if simply getting near the pump would cause fuel to be magically transferred into one’s tank. We inserted ourselves into some semblance of a queue, and waited our turn.
While waiting for gas, a man approached our truck. He was probably in his sixties, with matted gray hair and a gnarled gray beard. He was carrying a sack with his things in it and appeared to be of European-Haitian mixed heritage. His clothes were tattered and layered and his skin weathered and filthy. Yet he had a dignity to the way he dressed and carried himself. In general, he reminded me of many of the homeless men I’ve met in Los Angeles or New York City.
The man looked at us, noticing, I imagine, the white guy in the back of a truck filled with Hatians, and spoke almost prophetically. “This is hell if you’ve never seen it!” The sentence struck me as strange—both it’s message and it’s structure. But there was also something sinister about it’s delivery—as if he was an authority on the matter of hell on earth. I wondered where this man had come from, and what else on the earth had he seen in his lifetime?
We reached the pump and began fueling the vehicle, paying with the remaining crumpled Haitian bills I had in my pocket. After a few gallons of gas had dripped into our tank, the pump had run dry. Haitian men were crowding around our vehicle and both Ben and our driver were working to get them to back away.
After narrowly eluding a debacle at the gas station, we continued our slow, crawling journey up hill. Late in the afternoon, after stopping for directions four or five times, we finally pulled up to Villa Creole. At a first glance, it was an exceedingly nice hotel, with traditional architecture akin to the finest buildings in Haiti—a mixture of colonial and Caribbean style. It was nestled up on the hill, steeply overlooking the city below.
We parked the truck and walked down the narrow cobblestone path that led to the hotel’s entrance. Outside of the hotel a small tent-city had developed. Lawn chairs and make-shift tents were spread out in all directions along the edge of the hotel properly—which had a mini-fortress of gates, high walls, and shrubs around it. Many of the people that were the closest to the hotel walls were severely injured. I imagine, since Villa Creole was a haven for not only the press, but also doctors and rescue workers, that they had laid their tents out in front of the compound in hopes of receiving medical attention from the people going in and out of the compound.
To get past the gate into the Hotel, I simply had to be white. The guard at the gate opened it immediately and let me and my Haitian brothers through, quickly squeezing it shut to prevent the Haitians begging at the gate from getting in.
We had entered another world. For several days, save for Doug, I had been with only Haitians—but this was a place swarming with out-of-towners. There was a massive pool out back (which was emptied) that was surrounded with the busyness of a newsroom. Closest to the partially-collapsed hotel was a frenzy of various photographers and staff-writers working away on stories, trying to meet deadlines and fighting with the constantly over-strained and limited wireless connection.
Apart from the journalists’ work stations were tables filled with rescue workers who were taking a break from their work, doctors, and other various aid workers. Food stands had been set up by the hotel staff to feed everyone, and, though many were staying in rooms in the wing of the hotel that had not collapsed, many tents and sleeping bags were spread out on plots of grass throughout the hotel property.
As soon as we entered the hotel premises, a short, young photographer with black-rimmed glasses and a black long-sleeve shirt approached me and energetically introduced himself as Simon, the photographer friend I’d been in communication with all week. He gave us the tour of the facility and run-down of protocol—how to get food, where to stay. He introduced us to all of the other journalists he’d met, and told us all of the connections and tips he could give us. And then, after the whirlwind tour, he buzzed off with a couple of French journalists to photograph at General Hospital.
Villa Creole became a sort of base, a safety zone, a reprieve from the constant shock of what was happening outside its doors. Villa Creole had food and drinks. It had information, internet, empathizing expats. It provided comfort, a feeling of peace and quiet and retreat. And I was thankful for that. But with that comfort came a change in situation—and a complete re-orienting of my Port au Prince experience thus far. The moment I set foot in Villa Creole, my connection with the Haitian people weakened. My ties to their suffering loosened. From that point on, as long as I was at Villa Creole, I felt removed.
Granted, inside Villa Creole’s walls came resources that allowed me to do more—to do some tangible good for the people in there. But my new partners to accomplish these things were doctors from the states, journalists from abroad. They were no longer “my Haitian brothers.” If my story in Haiti had two chapters, the first one would come to a close that night. The second chapter, though it’s characters worked for CNN and Medicins sans Frontiers, was a little more detached from the reality of Haiti’s broken state.
I learned a great deal about journalism that week. And I met a lot of fabulous journalists. But I was incredibly thankful that I was not in Haiti as a journalist. A documentarian, yes. The difference was that I had no assignment, no budget, no time constraints, no insurance concerns. No agenda. Up until that point my “story” had been drawn out in front of me only a few moments at a time. I followed where that story led me without, most of the time, knowing how it would turn out. But I kept following that line in the sand, several steps at a time, and that mentality led me straight to the heart of the people.
I do not want to demonize the work that foreign correspondents do. Quite the contrary. I have a great deal of respect for the work that they do—for facing human suffering on nearly a daily basis throughout their year. But most of them tended to operate within their own circles, within their own carefully-drawn boundaries and standards of practice. As an outsider, it was fascinating to watch. And though most of writers and photographers I met were genuinely good people, with deep concern for the people of Haiti, I did see a few unsavory things through the course of the next few days.
As the sun was getting lower in the sky, Ben and Doug set out with Ben’s laptop to try and get a wireless signal. I sat with my fellow Haitian team and waited. After a short while, Ben used the remaining cash he had to buy us all plates of hot food that the hotel was providing. We scarfed them down as though we hadn’t eaten in days. And waited.
If there’s one thing I’m bad at, it’s waiting. So I grabbed my camera and took a walk in the tent “town” that had developed outside the walls of the hotel. I barely took any pictures. I mostly just walked around and smiled, probably awkwardly, at all of the people. Waving at this mother bathing her child, or that mother hanging up laundry on a tree branch. Smiling at this child playing football, or that father relaxing in the shade.
Nearby, a building had crumbled to pieces. I climbed up on the heap of cinder blocks and could smell the bodies that were rotting underneath. Covering my face with my t-shirt-mask, I stared out into the valley below. With the sun setting low in the sky, there was an impeccable, orange-yellow light filling the city, illuminating the hazy dust-filled air. Below me was a tragic sight of cinderblock dripping down the hillsides as though the ground underneath were melting ice-cream.
After staring out into the valley for what seemed like eternity, I climbed down the mound and began walking back toward the hotel. Just outside the gate a child no more than 3 years old came bounding towards me. He and his buddy had been playing some kind of a game of tag, and I had become home base. He threw himself into my arms, safety zone, and laughed hysterically. His friend admitted his defeat.. I spun the boy around and set him back down next to his companion and they ran off down the hill to keep playing their game.
Back inside the compound I donated my time to Doug, helping him transcribe some e-mails. While finishing an e-mail to Doug’s wife, I overheard conversation from a correspondent from a notable New York City news-source that made me sick to my stomach.
As I said before, I have no desire to demonize the work that foreign correspondents do. And I need to emphasize that most of the journalists I met were hard-working people that were just doing their job the best they could under incredibly difficult circumstances. But there were several incidences in the media compounds throughout my week in Haiti that were very unsettling.
The man, who was irritable and spoke loudly and sharply, had already been complaining about the rate of inflation of meals at Villa Creole. Keep in mind that the manager of the hotel, whose home had collapsed, was housing his family in a dilapidated room and was himself sleeping in his car. As I sat typing, enduring this journalists’ frustrated rants, he started to complain about the people outside of the hotel—the roughly two-hundred homeless Haitians that had set up their homes and families outside Villa Creole’s walls. They had no where else to go. We were the guests, this was their neighborhood. We had homes to go back to. They had nothing.
But apparently, much to this man’s chagrin, they were beginning to stink. They were “pissing and shitting in the streets” he complained, not to mention that the building across the way was starting to make the air smell like dead bodies. And he was livid. How was he supposed to focus on his work with all that nuisance of dead-body-fecal-smell in the air? And what was the hotel staff going to do about it?
I’ve never fought a man in my life, but I want to rear back and lay him out with one fell swoop. Here he was in the comfort of the hotel compound, with wireless internet, a place to lay his head, delicious, enormous meals, and even a full open bar, and he was complaining that these destitute people outside dared to stink up his air. I felt a knot in my throat, but swallowed my words.
As the night crawled on, several empty gunshots were fired outside the compound—mostly likely some kids messing around and less likely any real skirmish—but nonetheless it put everyone in the press compound on edge. Our driver and Haitian brothers that had been traveling with us, and waiting patiently at the compound, were incredibly hesitant to head back to Ben’s mother’s for the night. But after Ben, Doug and I discussed the issue, we decided it would still be the safest and best option to pile back into the truck and head back home.
Our primary concern was that, though Doug, Ben and I could likely sleep in the compound with all of the other doctors and aid workers that were spread out on the grass, the rest of our crew would probably be asked to leave the compound before bed. And since they had already been locked out once by the hotel staff (Ben had fought with all of his entertainment-industry-post-U.S. Marine-skills to get them back in), it was decided that we should head back down the hill for the night where we could all have our own beds in the safety of a quieter part of town.
So we climbed back into the truck—Doug, Ben, myself, and our four companions. As we started bouncing our way over the dirt road away from Villa Creole and out to the main road, several more gunshots were heard being fired about 25 feet away on the other side of a ten-foot cinder-block wall. Terrified, our driver made the call, he would not attempt to drive down the hill through Petion Ville in the dead of night.
So we backed back into our parking spot about 30 feet from the gated entrance to Villa Creole. It was about 11 PM. Once we had parked I hopped out of the back of the truck and around to the door of the cab. I looked at Ben.
“What are we going to do?” I asked him, knowing.
“I guess we’ll just try and get some sleep here. You and Doug and I can probably go back inside and sleep where it’s safer, but these guys are going to need to stay out here.” He finished his sentence with an open-ended inflection in it as if he was waiting for me to say something before he continued. I looked at him, knowing that wasn’t going to happen. We were one in mind. If anyone slept outside, we all slept outside.
In the back of the truck my three Haitian brothers were situating themselves up against the cab, trying simultaneously to spread themselves out as much as possible, whilst trying to huddle together to keep warm. For my part, I leaned my backpack against the rear wheel-well and unloaded a couple of things from my bag: a tiny stuff-sack that I’d brought, my rain-shell, and a fleece. I unpacked the sleeping bag out of the stuff-sack and unzipped it into a small blanket. I tossed that towards the back for my three brothers to use as a cover. I don’t speak Creole and they didn’t speak English, but we nodded at each other and smiled. “We’re all in the same boat here.” I pulled on my fleece and leaned back against my backpack. I pulled my orange rain-shell up over me like a blanket and kicked my feet up on the raised tailgate. There was no rear window on the truck’s shell, so though we had covering from potential rain, I had an open-air view of the stars glistening overhead.
That moment—sprawled out with my brothers in the back of a truck-cab in ravaged-Haiti, staring up at the stars, is strung together with only a few other major moments in my life. Strung together with that hilltop in Northern, that beach in Southern France. It was a rare moment in which I felt fully and utterly in the moment—for once completely un-self-aware or self-conscious. Pure, bathed in moonlight. One of the most treasured nights of my life, in a sense.
I’ve slept in the streets of Santa Cruz, CA, Los Angeles, CA, and Harrisburg, PA, respectively. I’ve also camped plenty, and slept in bizarre situations around the globe. I’m accustomed to sleeping in uncomfortable places. And though I didn’t sleep for long—at around 3:30 AM Ben woke me—I slept, once again, soundly, deeply, lost in an abyss of peace.
to be continued (soon I promised)…